Use Psychoacoustics to Craft a Huge-Sounding Mix

Psychoacoustics is all in your head—it’s the branch of
psychology concerning the perception of sound and
its physiological effects. Using the principles of psychoacoustics,
you can trick your listeners into thinking
a mix sounds louder, wider, and deeper than it really
is. Use these mind-bending tips to create an enormous-
sounding mix.

Detonate The Chorus

Psychoacoustics dictates that abrupt sounds seem
louder than those that build slowly to the same
level. It is the sharpness in contrast between silence
and peak level—and how quickly that transition
occurs—that creates the impression that something
is really loud.

If you want your mix to explode into the chorus—
or “hook”—of your song, hold your fire during the
verse and subchorus. Don’t introduce additional
instruments gradually as the song approaches the
chorus. Wait until the downbeat of the hook to pile
on extra tracks. Try introducing some percussive
tracks when the first chorus begins. You might even
consider muting all the drums until then. And if the
song allows, consider having a half or full bar of
silence (a musical rest) right before the downbeat of
the chorus. The abrupt onslaught of additional tracks
right after the peaceful calm will make your song’s
hook erupt with shock and awe.

Distort One or More Tracks

Play back—at the same level on your meters—two
pre-recorded electric guitar tracks, one clean and
the other overdriven with distortion. Which sounds
louder? Unless the clean track is significantly
brighter than the distorted one, your brain will
always tell you the distorted one is the loudest. Distortion
tricks the brain into thinking something is
very loud, even when it’s not.

Electric guitars aren’t the only tracks that benefit
from this sleight of hand. If you can’t make your vocal
track loud enough to command your mix without clipping,
try adding a dash of distortion. The goal isn’t to
make the vocal sound noticeably fuzzy or dirty but to
add just enough harmonics to make it sound louder.
The SPL TwinTube, Soundtoys Decapitator, Softube
Focusing Equalizer (part of the company’s Passive-
Active Pack bundle), and iZotope Nectar plug-ins
are all outstanding for this purpose. (See Figure 1.)
Add a little bit of plug-in processing to the vocal,
and it will sound louder and bigger than the dry
vocal at the same output level.

Put It Off Until Later

Fig. 2. Some delay-modulation plug-ins, such as MOTU Chorus, allow sufficient parameter controls for you to create the Haas effect.

In last month’s Techniques article “Learn How to Space
Out,” I discussed how adding pre-delay to a reverb
patch makes the resulting virtual acoustic space sound
farther away. The longer it takes for a sound to arrive in your ears, the farther away the brain interprets that sound’s
origination to be. But to complete the mental picture, you
must also account for a real-world phenomenon called
high-frequency transmission loss. This acoustic effect dictates
that the farther a sound travels through air, the more
its high frequencies will be attenuated.

The longer the pre-delay you program into your reverb
patch, the more highs you should roll off the reverb return
using either a low-pass filter (LPF) or high-shelving cut.
That is, as the pre-delay’s time in milliseconds increases,
progressively lower the corner frequency for your LPF or
shelving EQ. Doing so will add natural and convincing
depth to your mix and trick your brain into thinking the
sound is coming from behind your speakers! To fool your
brain most effectively, make sure some other elements of
your mix are mostly or completely dry. It’s the contrast
between dry and delayed sounds that tricks the brain into
thinking one thing (the dry track) is very close to you and
another (the pre-delayed reverb) is farther away. You
can’t create a sense of depth if everything is far away.

Make It Wide Using the Haas Effect

Just as delay can make something sound deeper, it can
also be used to make a track sound wider. Hard-pan a
mono keyboard comp part or rhythm guitar track to the
left and bus the track to an aux channel via a send in your
DAW’s mixer. Insert a delay-modulation plug-in on the aux
channel. Hard-pan the aux to the right, set the plug-in’s
output to 100% wet, and set the delay time to around 7
milliseconds. Now program a very slow and shallow modulation
of the delayed signal: Set the plug-in’s speed or
rate control to around 0.8Hz and its depth or width control
to roughly 17%. Modulating (cyclically varying) the
delay time in this manner makes the track’s delayed component
sound alternately closer to and farther away from
its dry sound in the opposite speaker, tricking the brain
into constantly shifting the stereo image. The resulting
Haas effect will make your mono track sound stereo and
add subtly shimmering movement between left and right
speakers. MOTU’s Chorus plug-in (for Digital Performer)
can easily create the Haas effect, and it sounds terrific.
(See Figure 2.)